‘I went to prison while he played video games’: Sofia Sapega, arrested alongside journalist Roman Protasevich after Belarus forced their Ryanair flight to land in Minsk, tells her side of the story

On May 23, 2021, Belarusian security services tricked a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius into landing in Minsk. On board were Roman Protasevich (Raman Pratasevich) and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Protasevich had been the former editor-in-chief of the popular Telegram channel Nexta, which coordinated the 2020 protests in Belarus. Sapega administered the Telegram channel “Black Book of Belarus,” which published the personal data of security officials involved in violence against protesters. The couple was detained. Both cooperated with investigators, and both managed to avoid the lengthy prison sentences they faced — though in very different ways. Protasevich became one of the mouthpieces of Alexander Lukashenko’s propaganda. Moscow intervened on Sapega’s behalf (she holds Russian citizenship), which led to her being pardoned in 2023 and transferred to Russia. Unlike Protasevich, Sapega tried to stay out of the spotlight and spent about a year in a penal colony before her release.Sofia Sapega is now back in Lithuania, where she lived and studied before the ill-fated Ryanair flight was forced to land in Minsk. In a lengthy interview with Zerkalo, she gave her version of what happened to her and Protasevich after their detention. The interview is split into two parts; only the first has been published so far. Meduza has collected the most interesting quotes from Sofia Sapega. We present them with minor abridgments.The plane’s landingI was sitting with my headphones on and had dozed off. I knew we were supposed to land in 15 or 20 minutes. Then suddenly there was an announcement over the loudspeaker that we needed to land in Minsk because of some kind of threat. I didn’t scream or cry. But at some point I noticed my knees were shaking. Roman, though, started shouting at the flight attendant: “You can’t, don’t land the plane now, this is about us!” He completely panicked and was practically hysterical. That’s why, when I hear that he supposedly knew everything in advance and was a KGB agent, it’s hard for me to believe it.***Everyone [the other passengers] buckled their seatbelts and waited to land, as if it were normal. Then we got off the plane and went into the airport building. Customs officers started calling women in for inspection. I thought, “This is for me.” I stood there for a couple of minutes, then reasoned: why make people wait? In the end, I was among the first to go. […] I was taken into a small room. There I saw a tall, red-haired man surrounded by officers from the GUBOPiK. It was Artur Gaiko. And at that moment I thought, “Oh, shit!”***I think [Protasevich’s claim that the opposition staged the plane’s landing in Minsk to secure sanctions against Belarus] is simply the absurd theory of a man who wasn’t in his right mind. There’s no logic to it: why would people who were documenting the crimes of Belarusian security officials organize a plane landing involving us, putting us in danger ourselves, just to get sanctions imposed? Sanctions were already being imposed in response to the actions of the Belarusian authorities, and there was no need to stage something like this to achieve that.After the detention[First they took me to the GUBOPiK building, where they recorded] a forced “confession” video. I desperately didn’t want to do it. At first they wanted to hang a Belarusian red-and-green flag behind me, but I refused to record anything with it in the background. Then Gaiko said, “Just get that damn Belarusian flag out of here. There’ll be a text now, she’ll say it, and that’s it, we’re leaving.” One of the GUBOPiK officers said flatly, “Either you read the text, or we’ll beat you right here, right now.” I was never beaten at home, and I didn’t want to be beaten in this place. In the end, I read everything they gave me. ***Artur Gaiko, along with other officers, brought me to the Okrestina detention facility. He seemed to think I didn’t realize who he was. But I recognized him [by his voice], and by that point I already understood quite clearly how information had leaked from Black Book of Belarus. And afterward it was very painful to realize that many people thought it was me who had given them up. […] The only person I talked about was Bogdanovich… I also said that Protasevich worked for Nexta. But, as far as I understand, by that point they already had that information anyway. ***It was freezing cold in the cell. The first night I slept on a mattress right on the floor and was terribly cold. The next day I was moved to another cell with women going through withdrawal and sex workers. To warm up a little, I sat huddled with one of them — she had a down jacket on. At that point it felt like this was the end for me. I found something like a pebble or a piece of soap and wrote on the dirty green wall: “I will die here.” I had no hope of getting out. But I felt almost nothing. I hadn’t cried once since my detention.***[I was beaten] once, at Okrestina. A man over 45 in black calls me out into the corridor. We step out. He’s standing there along with a young guy holding a baton: the [duty officer]. He says to me, “Turn around.” I turn around, and I get hit on the back. I didn’t say anything, didn’t make a sound; it all felt as if it wasn’t happening to me, as if I were a silent observer. I didn’t feel any pain either. Then they turned me back to face the man in black, and he says, “Well, scum, now you’ve been caught.” And I stay silent. What am I supposed to say? You’re a grown man, and you’re seriously doing this? InterrogationsFrom May 23 to 25, I was held in the detention facility, after which I was transferred to the KGB pretrial detention center. I still remember that cell. It looked like a coffin: it widened slightly at the far end and narrowed toward the door. The window was tiny, and instead of a toilet there was a bucket. It was at the KGB that I was first allowed to see a Russian consul. […] The consul asked if I needed anything passed along to my parents. I answered, “Could you please take me out of here?”***A month [I spent in the KGB pretrial detention center]. And the whole time I was there, I stayed silent… Gaiko tried several times to talk to me nicely. […] I was supposed to fully admit guilt, ideally go on a show like Protasevich did, and cooperate with the investigation. […] I refused to testify, citing the Constitution. I was used to not giving anyone up, and I expected the same from others. For me it was simple: if we stay silent, we stay silent together.Cooperating with the investigation[Protasevich and I] hadn’t seen each other from the moment of our detention until I ended up in the KGB pretrial detention center. And what did this idiot do at our first meeting? He started trying to talk me into signing a pretrial cooperation agreement. He unleashed a whole tirade on me: “God, Sofia, you’re not going to give anyone up. They’re abroad, and you’re about to go to prison, they’ll give you 12 years.” Then he started crying and got down on his knees in front of me. I was sitting on a chair, and he knelt in front of me repeating, “Sonya, please, sign it.”***In the end, after sitting and thinking it over, I decided to sign the agreement. You understand, just a few days before that, they brought another woman into my cell. Her face was a mess: she came in completely purple [from beatings]. Of course, that also influenced my decision. But it’s also important that at that point I still had some feelings for Roman and was afraid for him. Now, looking back, I understand that it was a kind of emotional game.***By that point, my [cooperation] agreement no longer had any practical use for the Belarusian side. They had Artur Gaiko. And a large part of the information I could have provided was, one way or another, already known to them long before my detention. Whatever I said or did, much of it had already been recorded. One investigator even told me once that my admission of guilt and cooperation were just for show. So I saw the whole thing more as part of a political farce.Under house arrestA couple of days after signing the agreement, [Protasevich and I were placed under house arrest]. At first we lived in a two-story house outside Minsk. The KGB had rented the house posing as IT workers. We were taken there wearing sleep masks. Several officers sat on the first floor and in one of the rooms on the second floor. We lived in one room and tried to support each other. […] I’m sure they were filming and recording everything there. Still, the security officials treated me with complete politeness. ***We lived in the house for about a month. About two or three weeks in, Protasevich was given a phone, and later a laptop (naturally, both had been modified by the KGB so they could track IP addresses and so on). He had to show that he was alive and well. There were all kinds of rumors going around that his heart had given out or that something else had happened to his health. On top of that, while under house arrest he got access to Twitter. Running it was part of his cooperation agreement. ***[I wasn’t asked to run social media]. They knew I’d refuse. I turned down interviews too. The only thing I did was give an interview to [propagandist] Ksenia Lebedeva. It was done under duress. Obviously, of my own free will I would never have gone to her. But by that point, it was a question of either my well-being or the lack of it.On her attitude toward Roman ProtasevichNot even a day had passed, not even a couple of hours [after our detention], and [Protasevich] started talking. For which, naturally, he got privileges. After I was placed under house arrest, I learned that they bought him shirts for his appearances, that he got to stay not in a cell at the pretrial detention center but in a separate room with a bed, that they bought him kebabs. The most surprising thing for me was the episode when he said he had been drinking with KGB officers. The carrot-and-stick approach worked on him perfectly. He gave investigators enough testimony against me to fill an entire volume of the case file. I only found out about it when I reviewed the case files.***He gave up right away. Just like that, with a snap of the fingers. There was a moment involving the plane when he was writing some kind of rebuttal. I told him, “The facts don’t add up. What are you doing?” The only thing he said in response was, “Does it even matter anymore? None.”***[His words about how he tried to save me] are disgusting nonsense, if only judging by what actually happened afterward. I did time in a penal colony while he played video games and got married several times. So he’s a self-styled knight in shining armor, it turns out.At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. 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